Uma investigação sobre a memória de trabalho e desenvolvimento da leitura e escrita em crianças participantes do Projeto Acerta

Abstract

The aim of this longitudinal study is to investigate working memory (WM) (BADDELEY e HITCH, 1974; DANEMAN e CARPENTER, 1980; ENGLE, 2004; BADDELEY, 2012; among others) and the development of reading and writing (CABRAL, 1986; FRITH, 1985; EHRI, 2005; DEHAENE, 2009, 2010, 2015, among others) in participants of Project ACERTA (Avaliação de Crianças em Risco de Transtorno de Aprendizagem) of Ensino Fundamental 1 from six public schools in Natal-RN from 2014 to 2016. For this purpose three research questions guided this study: (1) How is working memory related to the writing and reading development of the participants of this research?; (2) How can working memory predict the development of reading and writing of the learners of this research? and, (3) How can Provinha Brasil (PB) predict the development of reading and writing of the participants of this research? The 57 participants took Provinha Brasil in 2014 and they also did reading and writing tasks and WM evaluations (AWMA – Automated Working Memory Assessment) from 2014 to 2016. The quantitative results from Spearman correlations to answer the first research question and corrected by FDR (False Discovery Rate) pointed towards that: (1) verbal WM did not correlate significantly with any of the reading and writing activities proposed in 2015 and 2016; and (2) the non-words WM activity correlated significantly with accuracy activity, reinforcing the similarity and differences in tasks designed to measure the same things, but with different types of input. In response to the second research question, the quantitative results obtained by linear regression pointed towards WM not predicting the reading development of children in any of the four activities proposed in 2016, which does not corroborate the hypothesis that WM by itself is able to predict reading development. Contrary to expectations, the results point to short-term memory as a possible tendency to predict the development of our participants in accuracy and copy activities. Lastly, to answer the third research question, also by linear regression, Provinha Brasil 2014 was considered an ineffective predictor of reading and writing development in 2015 and 2016, once only two from eight activities could be predicted by Provinha Brasil 2014. The proposed discussion aims to shed light on the variables that impact the learning process of reading, from a neurocognitive point of view.